Literature and Creativity

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Saturday, May 28, 2016

If there is a reliable truism
that can coexist alongside the American film industry’s dance of death with
economically insane budgets that now routinely soar north of $200 million, it
is that (most) critics and potential ticket-buyers can be counted on to review
bad buzz and publicized woes of dollars and production instead of the actual
movie once it finally finds its way to a screen. And it may in fact be true
that the drama behind the scenes often outstrips the quality of the wide-screen
finished product, though certainly this is not always the case. The reception
of big-budget box-office flops like John Carter,The Lone Ranger, Jupiter Ascending and
Oliver Stone’s Alexander are but some late examples of our number-crunching
obsession with pop culture minutiae and the fascination of a behemoth’s
preordained fall. Most who trudged out to see any of these films during their
theatrical runs probably knew more about their troubled histories and the swirl
of negative word-of-mouth (generated before a single ticket was sold) than they
did, in the case of John Carter,
about Edgar Rice Burroughs, upon whose once-popular novels that movie was
based; the well-publicized rumors of discontent at Disney which preceded that
movie’s release ended up serving as the real text to which audiences referred
when they finally saw the film.

So what’s new? Stories of studio publicity departments
dodging bad press and creating their own legends about the rocky road traveled
to the silver screen are a movie history tradition, and the stories they peddled
were more often than not vivid, unstable and as combustible as if they’d been
printed on nitrate film stock. The brouhaha over Michael Cimino's Heaven’s Gate, including Steven
Bach’s compulsively readable account of its out-of-control production in Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists pushed behind-the-scenes battles into the public
arena like never before, not only helping to put a gravestone on the age of the
unfettered auteur in American filmmaking, but also ushering in the current
entertainment reportage obsession with catching a glimpse of Oz behind the
curtain, an era in which no aspect of a movie or TV show’s creative birth goes
undocumented or unexamined.

But movies whose names become synonymous with the wretched
excess and folly of the movie business are fairly rare. Heaven’s Gate is
one. So is my beloved 1941. John Carter and The Lone Ranger may prove to be others.
(Titanic was all ready to join the crowd, but it turned out Fate
had something else in store for James Cameron’s potentially checkbook-boggling
shipwreck.) Twenty-five years ago this week, Hudson Hawk,directed by the team who made previously made
the cult hit Heathers, director Michael Lehmann and screenwriter Daniel
Waters, also arrived in theaters under a ripe thundercloud of bad
press, originating from its own studio as well as entertainment media watchdogs.
That cloud further accumulated a shower of disdain for its
popular star, Bruce Willis, whose screen persona made plenty of room for smug
self-regard and who was perceived, after the success of Moonlighting,
Die Hard and its first sequel, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, as
somehow needing a good old-fashioned Hollywood spanking to bring him back down
to earth. (Willis managed to not be held significantly responsible for
appearing in another apocalypse the previous year, Brian De Palma’s ill-fated The
Bonfire of the Vanities.)

The reviews for Hudson Hawk weren’t any too
kind either, most echoing hyperbolic sentiments typified by Peter Travers (“A
movie this unspeakably awful can make an audience a little crazy. You want to
throw things, yell at the actors, beg them to stop.”) or Mick La Salle, who
wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that “There is probably
not one interrupted 60-second stretch in which a line of dialogue doesn't
clunk, an action doesn't ring false or an irritating plot turn doesn't present
itself.” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman at least sensed a pulse—
“This may be the only would-be blockbuster that's a sprawling, dissociated mess
on purpose. It's a perverse landmark: the first postmodern Hollywood disaster.”

It’s valuable to be reminded, however, that not all the notices at the time
were scathing. In his indifferent capsule review, critic Jonathan
Rosenbaum was quick to remind his readers of Hudson Hawk’s
roots in ‘60s genre spoofs like Our Man Flint and Modesty
Blaise and noted that “at least the filmmakers keep it moving with
lots of screwball stunts.” And the notoriously cranky Richard Schickel was
feeling downright generous, dispensing a bit of wisdom that would prove
prescient regarding believing the hype: “If you can see past the thicket of
dollar signs surrounding Hudson Hawk,” Schickel wrote, “you may
discern quite a funny movie-- sort of an Indiana Jones send-up
with a hip undertone all its own.”

I saw Hudson Hawk on its opening night, May
24, 1991, at the Pacific Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, and by the time I took
my seat that two-word title had already become industry code for what producer
Tri-Star chairman Mike Medavoy, in recounting the making of the movie in his
memoir You’re Only As Good As Your Next One, termed “a total
fucking disaster.” What I saw on screen that night didn’t rank in my eyes as a
moral or aesthetic crime, but I was none too taken with it either; I remember
reacting against what felt like the ultimate loud, incoherent inside joke, one
which the performers obviously thought was a riot (it certainly sounded like
one) but whose humor thoroughly escaped me. I also freely admit I was in the
Spank Bruce Willis camp-- and the Spank Joel Silver camp too, for that matter.
(Though for being the bull in the china shop that ushered the Wachowski
Brothers’ vision of Speed Racer to the screen, Silver gets an
eternal pass from me.) To my eye, Hudson Hawk at the time was
crass and disposable, a symptom of a system of making movies that was totally,
fatally out of whack, and I had little trouble spending the next 21 years in
almost total disregard of this latest Hollywood flame-out.

So why was I laughing my helpless ass off at Hudson
Hawk when it saw again in 2012, on a thoroughly enjoyable
double feature with Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief at the
New Beverly Cinema here in Los Angeles? I’ll admit a certain attraction to the
disreputable, a perverse desire to find something in a beat-up, bedraggled
movie that others just don’t see. But recent re-encounters with movies as
diverse as John Frankenheimer’s 99 and 44/100% Dead, Ridley Scott's Legend,
Brian De Palma’s Scarface
and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (to name but a very few) have proven that
sometimes a rotten egg is just a rotten egg. My reaction to Hudson Hawk might also have something to
do with my own recent voracious appetite for laughter. Those who bestow awards
don't give much of a crap about comedies, but so often they are the movies I'm
most happy to see, the ones I feel like I need more than others, and I feel
like I’m often more likely to respond to the sometimes desperate impulse
underlying comedy than others might, or seem willing to. I am, after all, a huge
fan of the Farrelly Brothers’ The Three Stooges,
anothermovie that was crucified on
the Internet solely on the basis of its idea and its trailer. (Does this make
me the ideal demographic for this summer’s Ghostbusters
reboot?)

But of course “funny ha-ha” is probably the most subjective
and elusive response that a movie can go fishing for—it’s not as reliable or
quantifiable as the tears or the swelling of pride or fear that movies in other
genres can more easily access, which is probably why laughs, which may seem
more fleeting, don’t get as much in the way of award respect. The kind of
hi-jinks on display in Hudson Hawk can be infectious, or they
can be, when echoing off the walls of an empty auditorium as they did when I
saw the movie 21 years ago, off-putting, a sign of the movie’s insular
disregard for anything beyond the pleasure of the folks who made it.

Hudson Hawk is big, cluttered, and
dingy-looking, all qualities that I associate, rationally or irrationally, with
the type of sausage usually spit out by Tri-Star and other companies in the
‘80s and early ‘90s. The cinematography, credited to Dante Spinotti (Manhunter,
Heat, The Last of the Mohicans) but also presumably including contributions
by Jost Vacano (Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Das Boot), who was
fired six weeks into shooting, is inconsistent, flatly lit and composed one
moment, particularly in the dank-looking interiors, then incandescent and
receptive to the natural beauty of the Italian locales the next. And it’s
filled with actors who either travel from scene to scene unsure of what kind of
movie they’re in (Exhibit A, Andie MacDowell, though she gets major points for
her drug-induced dolphin impersonation) or who seize on the raucous,
over-the-top sensibility rooted in Daniel Waters’ irreverent rewrite of Steven
De Souza’s more straightforward caper script and turn the knob all the way up
to 11 (Exhibit B, everyone else in the cast).

Willis clearly overestimated his appeal as a smirking,
self-assured hipster with this role, but the performance works because it's in
conflict with his status as a newly emergent action icon. The tension between
the two approaches provides much of the movie’s comic juice, especially when he
so willingly dives in the silly pool and bumps up against performers who are
clearly from another world. The presence of James Coburn, Flint himself, is of
course a major clue as to the intent of director Michael Lehmann and the other
filmmakers in regard to tone and pop culture touchstones. But the very notion
of casting Sandra Bernhard and Richard E. Grant as
the super-villainous Mayflowers, who force Willis’ master thief into stealing
rare Da Vinci treasures that will somehow pave the way for their ascendance to
World Dominator status certainly puts the movie’s cult sensibility at odds with
the prospect of reaching the level of mass appeal needed to justify a
multimillion-dollar budget. (These actors don’t project to the rafters, they
threaten to grab them in their powerful jaws and masticate them into dust.)
Bernhard, Grant, Coburn and a host of other game participants, including Frank
Stallone, Lorraine Toussaint, Leonardo Cimino and a pre-CSI David
Caruso, add a lot to the movie beyond an elevated level of cacophony. They
underline the movie’s goggle-eyed, giddy celebration of its own incoherence.

Inconsistency, or at least the harboring of warring impulses
of storytelling “rules” and anything-for-a-laugh energy within the same genre
peapod, is the game Hudson Hawk is playing right up front, and
it’s a game that usually doesn’t result in this many points prejudicially subtracted
when the context is wacky comedy. This is probably where the movie ran into
trouble with viewers and reviewers back in 1991—no one (Rosenbaum and Schickel
excepted, I suppose) had much of an idea what the movie had on its mind;
certainly not mass audiences who were conditioned, after Die Hard,
to come to a Bruce Willis picture with a set of expectations and prided
themselves on being able to detect (with some culturally pervasive help) the
scent of a stinker.

But it seems to me even the movie’s idea of a good joke is a
risky one. Waters’ notion of a couple of cat burglars (Willis and an eager
Danny Aiello) so in love with the hep cat culture of The Rat Pack that they’ve
memorized the length of the tunes just so they can use them to gauge the timing
of their capers-- in sing-along musical sequences that really helped to
alienate the cognoscenti back in 1991, no less-- will either make you giggle or
gag. (I giggled when I saw the movie four years ago, and then some.) And Willis
caught between the push of the megalomaniacal Mayflowers and a deadly band of
rogue C.I.A. assassins named after candy bars results in some patently bizarre
action-comedy sequences which make the sensation of having no idea what will
come down the pipe next a gleefully pleasurable one. You laughs at what you
laughs at, and if the movie’s wicked, cynical, absurd vibe hits you just right--
it helps to be surrounded by an audience that is also similarly tickled— it is
entirely possible to have a much better time watching Hudson Hawk than
its tarnished reputation would ever suggest.

There’s little use in denying that the movie is something of
a major train wreck in terms of conventional structure, logic, temperament and
escalating ludicrous plot development. But what’s on screen also suggests that
the creative forces behind the movie, embittered and otherwise
drawn-and-quartered as they may have been, were also aware that the chaotic
energy of the production could be used in the movie’s favor. It was a genuine
pleasure to finally enjoy Hudson Hawk when I saw it that night
four years ago at the New Beverly, after having spent 21 years secure in the
belief that it was a piece of shit. The imminently self-deprecating Daniel
Waters was also in attendance, and his comments to the near sold-out
crowd suggested that although elements of the movie’s tortured history and its
reception in the marketplace might still be sore spots there was also the
feeling that he’s at peace with it, fully aware of the value of his
contribution and understanding that a movie this crazy has no chance of
pleasing everyone.

As it turned out, my daughter Emma and I sat in the seats
directly in front of the screenwriter, and I loved her vocal enjoyment of the
movie as much for her sake as for Waters’—the movie definitely appealed to her
emerging sense of the absurd and her appreciation of slapstick violence. But
the roaring of that New Beverly audience wasn’t entirely for Daniel Waters’
benefit-- they seemed to genuinely enjoy their time with Hudson Hawk,
a movie that the teeming, contradictory, fractured, multitasking sensibility of
American pop culture may finally have caught up with. As Waters himself
characterized it, on the Island of Misfit Toys that comprises his singular
sensibility as a screenwriter and director, Hudson Hawk might
most aptly be seen as the cinematic equivalent of the squirt gun that shoots
jelly. Of course there are those who want their squirt guns to do what squirt
guns always do. But there are also folks who have a pretty soft spot reserved
for a toy that does something unexpected, even if it makes a mess. For those, I
would guiltlessly recommend another (perhaps a first?) viewing of Hudson
Hawk.

***************************************

For those interested, I direct you to Joe Valdez’s solid account
of Hudson Hawk’s beleaguered production history that can be found
on the blog This Distracted Globe.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Nearing the halfway mark of the movie year
and teetering, as we all are, on the edge of another summer movie abyss which
holds only the thinnest promise of providing strong reason to tread amongst the
mall-igentsia in search of air-conditioned escape, I find myself feeling far
less regret than usual over the movies I’ve missed so far in 2016. Usually by
this point I’m bemoaning having had to sideline 20 or 30 interesting pictures
because I couldn’t get out to a theater. This year I’ve whiffed on about the
same number of movies of interest, but only nine or 10 of those misses have
anything like real regret attached to them. It does actively annoy me that I
will have to catch up with the likes of Apichatpong
Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor,
the foodie doc City of Gold, Jeff
Nichols’ Midnight Special, Ethan
Hawke as Chet Baker in Born to Be Blue, Joachim
Trier’s Louder Than Bombs, Luca
Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, Jason
Bateman’s The Family Fang, Lorene Scafaria’s
The Meddler and Rodrigo Garcia’s Last Days in the Desert on VOD as the
year slouches on. I’m counting on my favorite North Hollywood and Pasadena
second-run houses, the Valley Plaza and the Academy, to provide me ample
opportunity over the summer to catch up with The Jungle Book and Key and Peele’s Keanu at very reasonable prices. On the other hand, the lingering
specter of seeing Terence Malick’s Knight
of Cups seems with each passing day less like a privilege and more like an
obligation I feel dwindling urgency to fulfill.

As for that summer movie season
we’re currently staring down, amongst the reheated thrills of X-Men: Apocalypse and Warcraft and Alice Through the Looking Glass and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and The Conjuring 2: The Endfield Experiment and
Independence Day: Resurgence (just
the titles on those last three—jeez…)
there are several reasons to suspect that all won’t be entirely lost by the
time Oscar Bait Season rolls around. This weekend the reviews for Neighbors
2: Sorority Risinghave been
surprisingly strong, enough that my curiosity has been piqued even though I
thought less of the first installment than most everyone else did. Scott
Mendelson, writing in Forbes
magazine, seems to think the new Seth Rogen-Rose Byrne-Zac Efron-Chloe Grace
Moretz comedy has, aside from copious and memorable gross-out laughs, some
actual ideas regarding gender and identity politics worth chewing on along with
your popcorn; he even calls it “a revelation… one of the best movies of the
year and one of the all-time great comedy sequels.” What do you know!

My own personal hopes for a
high-quality hoot-and-a-holler, however, are more heavily invested in Shane
Black’s The Nice Guys, which recasts the writer-director’s familiar
buddy cop action comedy formula (Lethal
Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Kiss Bang Bang) as a nasty ‘70s-period L.A. romp
with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling essaying disreputable, downtrodden PIs who investigate
the apparent suicide of a porn star, only to peel back reeking layers of
smog-choked corruption in the process. (Calling Thom Andersen! Los Angeles does
not always play itself here—the movie
was shot partially in Atlanta.) And it is a strange day indeed when one can
check the listing for your local AMC Cineplex and see the latest from Dogtooth’s Yorgos Lathimos playing right
there alongside Captain America: Civil
War and The Angry Birds Movie. But
there it is: the director’s deadpan dystopian romantic dramedy The
Lobster, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, looks to be one of the
most tempting lures to get me out of the house this weekend. If you are
similarly inclined, then we’d both be well advised to lunge for it before those
multiplexes kick The Lobster to the
curb next Thursday to make room for the new X-Men
and that faux Tim Burton-Lewis Carroll movie.

The bulk of the summer menu may
lean heavily on tepid recycling and go light on genuine inspiration, but there
does look to be some potential among the more obvious dreck. Despite my better
instincts, I find myself not dreading either the DC Comics villain-fest Suicide
Squador the CGI-intensive jungle antics of The Legend of Tarzan, though I admit that the presence of
Margot Robbie in both pictures, as, respectively, the deliciously freaky Harley
Quinn and the legendary vine-swinger’s Jane, may be fueling my prejudice ever
so slightly. I will further admit a perverse, perhaps not entirely defensible
interest in seeing Blake Lively taunted by a shark for the entirety of The
Shallows,though I suspect she might have better luck in the company of
Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart navigating the calms of Woody Allen’s
comparatively sophisticated Café Society which, unlike the
legendary director’s last 268 movies, actually looks like it might be good.

Eschewing sophistication, if
Andy Shamberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer’s satire of celebrity
desperation, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, is only half as funny as
Samberg’s recent tennis parody Seven Days
in Hell, it’ll be worth seeing. And the chance to see Aubrey Plaza and Anna
Kendrick go deep, dark and psycho on Zac Efron and Adam DeVine’s clueless party
bros in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates(directed by Seven Days in Hell’s Jake Szymanski)
looks to be an irresistible festival of raunchy humiliation. Perhaps sketchiest
of all, the bizarre CGI-animated shenanigans of Sausage Party sets a
refrigerator full of suggestively shaped lunchmeats (voiced by the likes of
Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, James Franco and Kristen Wigg et al.) in search of the
meaning of their existence. Sausage Party
is unlikely to be a kosher experience, though it’s virtually guaranteed to
be free of the nitrates packed into that Oscar Meyer dog you could be wolfing
down while watching it.

I will say I am a tiny bit
trepidatious, however, about Ghostbusters-- perhaps
writer-director Paul Feig, who directed Bridesmaids
and The Heat and whose last
outing, the Melissa McCarthy-Bond sendup Spy,
was flat-out hilarious, will reveal within the context of the movie itself all
the funny that seems to be eluding audiences in those low-wattage trailers.
Funny or not, and despite the vaguely and sometimes blatantly misogynistic
online howling heard incessantly since those trailers debuted, it must be said
that no one’s rich cultural heritage is being raped and pillaged by a female-centric
reboot of an Ivan Reitman film. And if there has to be a new Ghostbusters in town, I’d rather
accommodate a new wrinkle like this one than get slimed for a third time while Bill
Murray yawns his way to another paycheck.

There is no such ambivalence on
my part over the prospect of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s
beloved children’s novel The BFG—this movie, featuring recent
Oscar-winner Mark Rylance as the titular big, friendly giant, looks to these
weary eyes to be as much of a sure thing as anything on the summertime roster.
The only thing that strikes me odd about The
BFG is how little in the way of buzzy anticipation there seems to be for a
new picture by one of the movies’ most accomplished storytellers. Does
Spielberg really have to threaten yet another Indiana Jones pictures to get the
connoisseurs of the Internet all aflutter?

And yet another big, friendly
giant looms on the horizon in the personage of a Disney live-action remake of Pete’s
Dragon, whose 1977 incarnation was half live-action already (and the
less said about that the better). Disney hopes their springtime success with
the digitized rehash of The Jungle Book
will be replicated here, though Pete’s
prospects seem far less preordained. The original version is, I suspect, a
classic only for the most nostalgically narcotized, which makes me wonder if
the hoped-for box-office crush might be a classic act of corporate
overestimation. Yet if any of the potential summer blockbusters has the
opportunity to genuinely upend expectations, particularly from an artistic
perspective, it’s this one—the new Pete’s
Dragon has been directed by David Lowery, whose ephemeral features St. Nick and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints seem like odd and unlikely training ground
for birthing a Disney behemoth. (Lowery also edited Shane Carruth’s supremely
impressionistic Upstream Color.) The
tension between this young director’s previously displayed ambitions and the
possibility of said ambitions being sublimated into a Hollywood mediocrity makes
Pete’s Dragon one of the summer’s
most intriguing high-wire acts.

None of the big summer treats described above
holds as much promise for me, however, as a trio of nonfiction features making
their bow (at least here in Los Angeles) during the month of June. The advance
word on both Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palmaand Thorsten
Schutte’s Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Wordshas beentantalizingly enthusiastic, and the prospect of seeing exhaustive
but, considering their subjects, presumably far from exhausted documentaries
focused on two of my personal artistic heroes is singlehandedly keeping my desire
for summer movies alive. Three-plus hours spent at the movies than listening to
the premier visual stylist of his generation and the most brilliant and
iconoclastic musician/composer of his
generation holding forth on what they do better than just about anyone when
they’re really cooking? How can these movies possibly miss? And then there’s Tickled, an acclaimed doc, which starts out as a “quirky” investigation into a
bizarre "competitive endurance tickling" underground and turns into a
harrowing... something else. The movie’s trailer hints of disturbing depths the
exact nature of which I hope can remain completely unspoiled until I actually
see the film.

************************************

So
much for hopes, high, low and otherwise. What about what I have seen so far in 2016? In my humble estimation, the best movie
of the year to this point, is most certainly writer-director Robert Egger’s
debut feature The Witch, subtitled “A New-England Folk Tale,” which made its
debut on VOD and Blu-ray this week. That subtitle should be taken seriously,
especially in light of the acclaim that greeted the movie at Sundance and
during its theatrical release as one of the best and scariest horror movies to
come along in a couple of decades. Because The
Witch actually lives up to both that level of hyperbole and its own modest descriptor, and on
its own precisely committed and near-obsessive terms, which says a lot not only
about what Eggers has achieved but also about what audiences have come to
expect from a modern horror movie, and why those expectations are most often
greeted by one disappointment after another.

The
movie does indeed feel closer to the telling of a folk tale-- perhaps a
cautionary one spun by other New England Puritans from the 1600s of this
movie’s period—or to the compact, elliptical shorthand of a masterful short
story, than to what audiences might start salivating for when they start
hearing claims of “best” and “scariest.” A farmer and his family are exiled
from a fortified Puritan church community for an unspecified offense and set
off on their own to claim a modest expanse of land at the edge of a forbidding
wood upon which to build a new farm, a new life. One day the farmer’s eldest
daughter, played with fetching guilelessness by newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy, tends
to her infant brother, playing with him a game of peek-a-boo. Three times she
hides then reveals her eyes, to the baby’s delight. The fourth time she
uncovers them, only to find that the baby has disappeared. Has the baby been
spirited away by a witch of the wood? Or as her family comes to believe,
spurred on by tragedy and hunger borne of failing crops, is she herself the
witch?

Despite the opportunity, Eggers is not in the business of using his superior
modernity to deride his characters for their beliefs. Yes, these are people for
whom tangible, sober reality does not preclude the satanically inspired existence
of broom-riding hags who delight in grinding the flesh and bones of children to
make paste for heathen sacrifices. But they are also twice exiled, from their community
of believers, but also from their home across the ocean, longing for the
relative comfort of home that the harsh wilderness refuse to provide. Eggers
portrays their struggles with empathy and respect, taking pains, through period
authenticity of sets, costume, and of language, to establish the humble, unforgiving
reality of life in a new world (reflecting, of course, the silent and
unforgiving nature of a loving God) that could as easily consume as fulfill those
who would harvest and tame it.

The Witch operates on such a level of visual and tonal confidence
that I often wondered if maybe it wasn’t Eggers who was possessed. Outside of a
tendency (mostly near the beginning) to rely overly on the atonal crescendos of
the score to build, and then momentarily dissipate dread, the movie barely
makes a misstep. According to the writer-director, the sort of arcane yet
lyrical dialogue with which the movie luxuriates—“Thou shalt be home by
candle-time tomorrow”-- was derived almost entirely from period court
transcripts and historical accounts of alleged witchery. As righteous as that
sort of pursuit of authenticity might be, it’s the mingling of it with the
director’s desire to stir an ambiguous response in his audience, to unnerve
viewers who may be atheistically convinced of the folly of religious conviction
with the possibility of supernatural influence, which fuels the movie’s most
profoundly frightening impulses.

Eggers
routinely toys with horror conventions, often deriving chills from his own
refusal to capitalize on shocks that seem to be coming yet never arrive—a dream
visitation from the dead does not end up with the CGI-infused punch line in
which a more typical horror movie might have lazily indulged. And The Witch is full of unostentatious,
lyrically unsettling imagery—a woman cackling hysterically as a raven pecks at
her breast, all the while dreaming of blissfully breastfeeding a baby; and
later, in the sudden freedom of a calm epilogue after horrific violence, a young
woman, her head looming in the frame and out of focus, stares out at a grave,
behind which looms the wood where her apparent destiny will be fulfilled.

The
movie is at times overwhelming, but it’s full of moments like these that sneak
up on you, and others which take you down harder and justify The Witch’s burgeoning reputation as a
great new horror movie-- I’m thinking of the death of one character which so
alchemically intertwines religious ecstasy and existential horror that almost
four months after having first seen it I don’t think I’ve fully escaped its
effects. When I first saw The Witch in
February there was a man sitting in front of me who obviously didn’t cotton to
the way the movie refused to conform to the rules of the schlock-shock
playbook, and when the movie made its final cut to all-consuming blackness he wasn’t
shy about blurting out his dissatisfaction and confusion: “What the fuck was
that?!” Others may find the ambiguities that Eggers carries through to the
movie’s end more fascinating. The Witch
is a movie that had me marveling at the mysteries of its darkness, not cursing
at them.

Saturday, May 07, 2016

Well, another year spent in the company of classic cinema
curated by the TCM Classic Film Festival has come and gone, leaving me with
several great experiences watching favorite films and ones I’d never before
seen, some already cherished memories, and the usual weary bag of bones for a
body in the aftermath. (I usually come down with something when I decompress
post-festival and get back to the working week, and this year has been no
exception.)

There have now been seven TCMFFs since its inaugural run in 2010.
I’ve been lucky enough to attend them all, and this time around I saw more
movies than I ever have before—18 features zipping from auditorium to queue and
back to auditorium like a gerbil in a tube maze. In order to make sure I got in
to see everything I wanted to see, I had to make sure I was in line as close to
an hour ahead of the posted screening time as possible, and given how tightly
the films had been packed together this year, accomplishing that proved to be
one of the biggest challenges for festival attendees, seemingly more so than
ever. I learned that there’s no time for hanging out after the lights come up.
It’s on to the next queue to get your number—there will always be someone to
talk to in line or to hold your place while you join the between-movie stampede
to the restroom.

Actually, I learned several things while attending TCMFF
this year, some of which surprised me and some of which confirmed beliefs or
festival strategies I already had, all of which contributed, mostly positively,
to my TCMFF 2016 experience. I came away thinking this might have been one of
my favorite of the seven TCMFFs I’ve attended, and maybe this quick remembrance
will give you some indication of why that seems to be true, ten things I
learned while attending this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival.

1) TO SEE THE MOST
MOVIES, MINIMIZE THE DISTANCE BETWEEN VENUES This has always been my
strategy for constructing my scheduled weekend at TCMFF, and this year I was
stricter than ever with this policy. I only left the main Chinese multiplex hub
twice this year, for the relatively quick jaunt over to the Big Chinese to see The Conversation and Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell. If a movie I
wanted to see was scheduled at the Egyptian, like The Long Goodbye or Repeat
Performance or The Passion of Joan of
Arc, or even further away at the Cinerama Dome, like the Smell-o-Vision
presentation of Scent of Mystery, I
swallowed hard and skipped it. Most of the temptations being dangled at the
Egyptian were ones I’d seen before; I’d even already seen Joan projected with a
live score. And heading to the Dome would have meant missing the opportunity to
see two rare films I’d never seen
before, one of which, Edward L. Cahn’s early Universal western Law and Order (1932) turned out to be
one of the best, and certainly most revelatory movies I’d see all weekend. By
sticking close to the multiplex, I was able to maximize the amount of films I
could see and still ensure that most of them would be first-time experiences.

2) IF YOU LIKE 35mm,
STAY CLOSE TO THEATER FOUR The amount of 35mm being shown at TCMFF 2016 was
down to only 33% of its offerings, most of those comprised of prints of
lesser-known films that rarely make it out of the vaults. Which is why you’ll
usually see these films only in the festival’s smallest venue, theater #4, the
only auditorium in the Chinese complex that can still show 35mm. Movies like Double Harness (1933) caught early buzz
this year and were tough to get into because the theater only seats 177 people,
and they rarely get scheduled into a big venue like the Egyptian (which has
35mm projection capability) because it’s much more difficult to anticipate the
level of audience interest in them. The rarity of the films shown in this
auditorium makes them catnip to festivalgoers like me, who program their
weekend around what they haven’t seen or even heard of, so much so that TCM
programmer Millie De Chirico, who often hosts the good stuff in this
auditorium, has started talking about a Theater Four Club (#Theater4Club) for
us perennial stalwarts.

3) FESTIVALGOERS CAN
BE A WHINY LOT Double Harness
sold out quickly on Friday morning, and even though it was showing in the #4,
where I’d just been to see Ida Lupino’s directorial debut Never Fear (1949), by the time that film let out the line to go
back in for Double Harness was
already beginning its long loop around the expanse of the outdoor food court.
Grumble, grumble, grumble, many could be overheard grumbling, already grumpy
over alleged “disorganization” of the festival. I knew, however, that such an
overwhelming crush of people to see this picture would guarantee it being
programmed into one of the festival’s Sunday “To Be Determined” slots, reserved
for the smaller movies that garner the most unexpected response measured simply
in how many people are turned away from its initial screening. Sure enough, Double Harness was scheduled for a
second screening Sunday morning, so I made sure I was there in line at 8:00
a.m. for the 9:15 a.m. screening… and I was still number 76 in line! I knew I
would get in, but as the line grew ever longer behind me, populated by people
straggling in a half hour or more later expecting easy entry, the grumbling
grew louder and the haranguing of exceedingly patient TCMFF volunteer staffers (like
Lillian pictured here, who I ran into frequently and who never had anything but
a smile on her face) began in earnest. There are few things more distasteful to
witness in this environment than the righteous and entitled fury of
festivalgoers who can’t figure out that being in line at least an hour early
for the sure sell-out of a movie which has already proved difficult to get into
is an absolute requirement. If you pay as much as you must for a pass to the
TCMFF, it might be a good idea to process such fundamental business ahead of
time so you won’t end up bullying a festival volunteer just because you
couldn’t drag your ass out of bed in time to see a movie.

4) HOW TO DO THE
TCMFF ON $6.50 Speaking of payment, unless you have a media credential like
mine, you’ve already spent as much as two or three thousand dollars on passes
and, if you’re coming in from out of town, food and accommodations before you
ever set foot on Hollywood Boulevard. But since I’m sponsored by a magazine to
write about the festival, my only expenses, provided I avoid the copious
opportunities to drop coin on overpriced swag at the TCM Boutique, are incurred
in transporting myself from Glendale to the Hollywood & Highland complex
where the festival takes place and in answering the occasional rumbling of my
prodigious belly. Well, this year I was determined to be as frugal as possible.
I popped my own popcorn and packed a variety of snacks (apples, PayDay candy
bars) and a load of homemade sandwiches (PB&J, ham and Swiss on rye) in my
bag each day. My one extraneous expense was a large Diet Coke purchased at the
Chinese multiplex snack bar. I kept hold of that cup from Friday through
Sunday, amassing something like four or five free refills, and the $6.50 I
spent on it was the only money I parted ways with all weekend long at the
festival. Viva filmy frugality!

5) GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA
IS A FINE COMIC ACTRESS I’d never seen Buona
Sera, Mrs. Campbell before, so my impressions of Gina Lollobrigida were
essentially confined to Beat the Devil
and her reputation as a va-va-va-voom Italian sexpot. Before she stepped on
stage with Ben Mankiewicz for an
interview preceding Buona Sera, TCMFF
ran a promotional film spotlighting her career not only in movies, but as an
acclaimed photographer and then, in a really unexpected third act, as a
sculptor. These were all aspects of Lollobrigida’s career of which I was
ignorant. And seeing Buona Sera, Mrs.
Campbell made me realizing that I was also ignorant of her prodigious
talents as a comic actress. She’s the glue that holds this emotionally resonant
farce together (it’s the unacknowledged inspiration for the stage hit Mamma Mia!), which can often mean
playing the sober center of a universe where the orbiting satellites get to
have all the wacky fun. But as Mrs. Campbell, suddenly besieged by the return
of three American soldiers to her Italian village, one of whom fathered her
daughter but all three of whom believe that they are the dad, she orchestrates
exasperation, panic, joy, and of course boundless sex appeal, with the ease of
a true maestra. It’s wonderful that
she had such a fulfilling life after the movies, but a performance like this
one can only make the tapering off of her movie career after this picture feel
like a missed opportunity.

6) FOLLOW MICHAEL
SCHLESINGER WHEREVER HE GOES If you’ve been to TCMFF more than once,
chances are you’ve been to a screening presented by producer, preservationist
and film historian Michael Schlesinger. He introduced one of my first
experiences at TCMFF at 2010, the hilarious comedy Murder, He Says, as “a parody of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre made 30 years before that picture even
existed.” He was right, and I’ve made sure to see at least one movie Schlesinger
has introduced every year since, which means I’ve had the opportunity to see
projected glories like the Abbott and Costello comedy Who Done It?, a thrilling restoration of Johnny Guitar and my own holy grail, Billy Wilder’s One Two Three with very appreciative
audiences. Last year Schlesinger didn’t get to share anything, so in 2016 TCMFF
gave him two showcases—Frankenstein Meets
the Wolf Man and the ultra-rare Bulldog
Drummond Strikes Back (1934) which was indeed, as Schlesinger insisted, “The
best movie you’ve never seen!” If you make it to a TCMFF in the future, do as I
do—make sure you see whatever it is Michael Schlesinger brings to the party.
I’ve never regretted doing so, and neither will you.

7) IT IS POSSIBLE TO WATCH AN ENTIRE MOVIE WITH
YOUR MOUTH HANGING OPEN I stumbled into a midnight screening of Noel Marshall’sRoar(1981) at the end of my first long
day of movies at TCMFF 2016, but there would be no dozing off. In this
notorious movie, Marshall and his real-life family, including
Tippi Hedren and Melanie Griffith, act out a very thin story of peril among a
menagerie of untrained and unpredictable lions, tigers, and panthers, was
without doubt king of this urban festival jungle in the realm of unbridled
disbelief. I'm pretty sure I've never watched an entire film with my mouth
hanging open in shock before this one.Roarisn't exactly a Disney True-Life
Adventure snuff film (nobody dies), but the absolute knowledge that people
could have been killed, and at the very leastwill beseriously mauled on screen, lends it a
sort of tension that's hopefully unique in movie history. The message the film
desperately wants to send—regarding the preservation and the majesty of
wildlife, particularly African cats of all shapes and sizes—keeps getting
blurred by the insanity of the situations into which dedicated animal
preservationists Marshall and Hedren put themselves and their family. The gore
in this movie is real, the disregard for human safety is lunatic and
irresponsible, and its motivations are strangely muddled, but I've never seen
anything like it. A classic? No. But I was riveted. As noted film historian
Richard Harland Smith suggests in his excellent article in the TCMFF program,
the best comment on the well-intentioned, if bizarre hubris behindRoar would be to program it on a double bill with
Werner Herzog'sGrizzly
Man.

8) DIRECTOREDWARD L. CAHN WOULD BE AN EXCELLENT
SUBJECT FOR FURTHER RESEARCH I’ve known and loved director Edward L. Cahn (here seen directing Judy Bamber in Dragstrip Girl) mostly for the late-career string of mediocrities he cranked out in the ‘50s
and ‘60s, long after the promise of his early career had been winked out.
Pictures like Creature with the Atom
Brain, Girls in Prison, The She-Creature, Runaway Daughters, Zombies of Mora
Tau, Voodoo Woman, Girls, Guns and Gangsters and Oklahoma Territory are all lean,
no-frills time-killers that are maybe more fun than they have any right to be.
And Cahn also directed one of my favorite ‘50s sci-fi classics, It! The Terror From Beyond Space, a
movie to which Alien owes more than
just passing acknowledgement. But I knew little of Cahn’s early career other
than that he was a top-drawer editor for Universal before landing in the
director’s chair for a series of inexpensive programmers for the studio, all
before becoming a fixture cranking out shorts for MGM from 1935 to 1949. One of
those movies, Law and Order (1932), screened
this year at TCMFF and made me think there might have been more to Cahn than
has ever met my eye before. The movie is essentially
the Gunfight at the OK Corral with the names changed (to protect the
mythological?), starring Walter Huston as notorious gunslinger-turned-marshal
Frame “Saint” Johnson, née Wyatt Earp. Cahn lendsLaw and Ordera
somber, elegiac and entirely unexpected attitude toward death. The numerous
killings here have a gravitas absent from the average horse opera of the day,
and the film's final shootout set piece has been choreographed and edited with
a surprising degree of poetry that made me think of Sam Peckinpah more than
once. I’m now more inclined than ever to seek out the eight other pictures
he directed before migrating to MGM in the hope that Law and Order wasn’t just some sort of aberration. And even if it
was, I’ll still have Girls, Guns and
Gangsters and It! The Terror from
Beyond Space.

9) FRANCIS
FORD COPPOLA MEANS MORE TO ME THAN I REALIZED I knew I couldn’t miss being
part of the audience to see The
Conversation at the Big Chinese on Friday afternoon; given that it wasn’t a
big hit, the TCMFF audience would likely be the biggest one assembled to watch
the movie since its premiere at Cannes in 1974. However, most of us were there
not only to see the movie, but to see it in the presence of its director,
Francis Ford Coppola. I passed on seeing Coppola get his hand and footprints
memorialized in cement earlier in the day; this was the big ticket. And when
Coppola came out on stage before the film, introduced by the ubiquitous Ben
Mankiewicz, something unexpected happened: I started to get choked up and
dropped a couple of tears in the process. Here was the director of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, two films which have meant so much to me in
my development as a movie fan and as one who appreciates them perhaps more
seriously, sitting down to talk about his movie and his process, and I was
there to see him. I’ve never been an across-the-board Coppola apologist, but
the emotion of this moment so surprised me that I came away thinking that it
was time to look again at films like Rumble
Fish and One from the Heart and Youth Without Youth and see if I might
have missed something the first time around.

10) PICK
THE RIGHT FILM WITH WHICH TO SAY GOOD-BYE Over my seven years at TCMFF I’ve
had pretty good luck ending my TCMFF experiences in style. My string of closing
films has included Metropolis, Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (with Haskell Wexler in attendance), Dial M for Murder (in glorious 3D) and Psycho. Even lower-wattage closers, like
Robert Evans introducing Black Sunday
and a screening of Alan Ladd as The Great
Gatsby (1949), had appeal, even if they didn’t hit hard like those first
four did. This year I had intended to finish off with Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon. But I started to get
weary on Sunday afternoon, and I started to miss my wife and my girls, whom I
hadn’t seen much of over the course of the festival’s three days and four
nights. So I decided to wrap things up with the glorious Technicolor of John
Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, a
perfect movie with which to end it all, as it has about three or four endings
just in itself. And it was indeed a perfect salutary to my TCMFF 2016, leaving
me with just the right mixture of soaring emotion and appreciation for the
experience of seeing such a grand Hollywood picture in the biggest and
brightest presentation ever. My fondness for this festival is anchored in being
privileged to witness screenings like this one, and one week later the
afterglow of ending on Ford and Wayne’s thrilling, big-hearted adventure has
yet to dissipate. That afterglow is one I expect I’ll still be feeling when it
comes time to gear up for next year.

A complete list of what I saw over the course of three days
and four nights would look a little something like this:

Tuesday, May 03, 2016

Here's a heads-up that the coverage of my experience at the 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival, which concluded this past Sunday, is now up and running at Slate magazine's blog The House Next Door.

The official theme of this year's festival was "Moving Pictures" which, according to the festival Web site, meant the festival would be dedicated to exploring films “that bring us to tears, rouse us to action, inspire us, even project us to a higher plane…the big-time emotions of big screen stories, from coming-of-age pictures to terminal tearjerkers, from powerful sports dramas we feel in our bones to religious epics that elevate our spirits.” That theme always seemed a little too amorphously defined to promise much in the way of creative curation, but as I dug into the movies I'd scheduled for myself a theme of my own spelunking began to emerge, spurred on by a Saturday night screening of Band of Outsiders:"Early on, our heroes sit for an English class in which their teacher, readying them for a lesson in Romeo and Juliet, emphasizes T.S. Eliot's observation that 'Everything that is new is thereby automatically traditional' as a way of softening her students' resistance to material that might seem musty or forbidding in any language. The quote suggests not only the teacher's belief that new texts can reorganize tradition, but also ways in which classic texts can achieve modernity, not just through themselves, but through constant recontextualization over time. Always one to recognize a movie convention, Godard uses the classroom scene to establish his modus operandi in much the same way as hundreds of films before and since have done. The teacher even spells it out on the chalkboard: to be classic is to be modern."Read more of my account of the 2016 TCM Classic Film Festival now playing at The House Next Door.